Last week’s poll: are you affected by industry’s skills shortage?

30th May 201710:25 am30th May 201710:27 am

The majority of poll respondents are directly affected by the engineering skills shortage in the UK.

A very clear majority — 59 per cent — of the 200 respondents to last week’s poll reported that they were directly affected by the much-discussed skills shortage in UK engineering, with only 15 per cent reporting that they had not encountered any skills-related problems. A similar number, 14 per cent, said that while they themselves were not suffering problems, their supply chain was struggling to find the skills it needed.

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I personally believe there is no skill shortage, with some employers being to ‘stand fast’ in their view regard only looking at people from within their own business without understanding, or realising that a lot of the ‘skills and experience’ they are looking for can actually be obtained outside of their business sector.
Of course the need for a decent salary will also prevent people from applying also.
So although I believe we have the skills out there currently, if we do not address the points made above we shall be compounding our own downfall with the next generation choosing a different career path.

The other aspect with this is that the people we have got are getting older and because of changes in the way we all live our lives they are able to retire earlier. We have lost several people in the last few years in their late 50’s/early 60’s and though we do train our own apprentices the 40 years experience is lost.

I have covered this subject many times before and as other commentators have pointed out the subject has been around for a long while. The two main reasons for the problem in the UK I would summarise and are related, but are connected by two differing levels(types?) of intellectual analysis necessary to understand and address them.

i) Socio-cultural: Young people <~22+ see themselves more through their personal (and prospective professional) ‘Identity’ and engineering just doesn’t cut it at that age. Also young people, however the engineering professions try to dress it up by promoting. environmental engineering type activities, on balance probably see Engineering as having an adverse impact on the Planet.
ii) Economic-political: too many ‘zombie’ low productivity, low margin, low growth companies are possibly in effect hoarding engineers. The lack of real enthusiasm for engineering companies to actual invest in training for themselves probably backs this up. They’d rather have others do the training for them.

There are ways to address both, and there are sub ‘reasons’ in each broad category, but possibly the challenge is that 'thinking like an engineer' may not be the (only/whole) way to address this problem.

In the mid seventies the change in our economy moved towards the financial sector which has performed well. Manufacturing moved to countries that offered lower production costs so naturally companies relocated or imported components. Young people looking at their future will take into account the salaries offered in the financial sector to those offered in engineering and decide whats best for them. A top banker can achieve a bonus in one term; it would take a top engineer fifteen years to earn the equivalent. In the last five years I have observed many qualified engineers who have moved to companies that pay for their talent, unfortunately non of the companies were located in the UK. We have to decide whether we make engineering an attractive future, youngsters have the freedom of choice and are not choosing engineering.

I think the real problem is spotting the talent. I have seen plenty of degree qualified “Engineers” who are not up to the job. There are people with real skill and enthusiasm but they lack the formal qualifications and therefore don’t make it past the Look at the CV stage.

Gentlemen, I am employed and will shorly be superannuating just because of shortage of skills. One aquires skill because of two factors, first being hungry for it and second being hungry in the belly. In my 40 years of experience, I have only seen engineers and diplomas frittering away the engineering-skill acquiring apprtunities for the sake of satisfying social egos by coercing the companies into pampering them. The less about the modern education system the better that produces kidstuff as adults. Same goes for the society at large which thinks its a sleeping beauty awaiting for a prince for free.